"If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill
him first."
The Talmud. [1]

This book ought to be a non-controversial item that will quickly find its way onto the shelves of all libraries
with an interest in international law. The authors' method is quite standard: a
compilation from seven nations of statutes on a particular subject. The translation of the
statutes into English is meticulous, and each of the statutes is accompanied by commentary
explaining its significance. [2]

In addition, as the legal academy works to improve itself
at hearing voices which have too long been ignored, this book makes a profound effort to
bring to our attention the lives of people, such as persecuted ethnic minorities, who have
been marginalized by scholarly research.

But in fact, this book will likely be bought by few law
school libraries. It is unlikely to be reviewed in the usual international law journals,
because in a number of ways, the book is so politically incorrect.

What is "wrong" with this book? First, its lead
author is an economist, not a law professor or even an attorney. Second, the topic of the
book is gun control statutes in nations which have perpetrated genocide in the twentieth
century. Third, the book's insistent thesis is that gun control paves the way for
genocide.

I. The Nations

The core of the book--the translations of the various foreign laws--is excellent, and should serve as a model for
similar books on other subjects. On the even-numbered pages are photocopies of the foreign
laws. On the odd-numbered, facing pages, are English translations of the laws. The foreign
statutes are photocopied from foreign statute books. Copies of the cover and publication
information pages from the foreign statute books are provided as well. This approach
encourages the most accurate translations, since any person who can read the language of
the foreign statute can instantly verify the accuracy of the translation. Meticulous
citations make the book all the more credible and valuable as a reference work.

While the authors do an excellent job in compiling the
various foreign statutes (many of which, such as Ottoman Empire statutes from 1860, are
quite obscure), the authors run into a serious difficulty as they attempt to analyze the
various gun laws in their historical context in each nation. As the authors acknowledge,
only the Nazi genocide has been carefully investigated. [3]
The victims of most of the other genocides were much less likely than European Jews to be
able to write Western languages (or to be able to write at all). Accordingly, they were
less able to leave any kind of record for history. Likewise, most genocidal regimes of the
twentieth century were considerably less devoted than the Nazis were in recording their
own activities.

Let us now turn to the individual nations whose gun
control laws and genocide records form the core of Lethal Laws.

A. Armenia

After the government of the Ottoman Empire quickly crushed an
Armenian revolt in 1893, tens of thousands of Armenians were murdered by mobs armed and
encouraged by the government. As anti-Armenian mobs were being armed, the government
attempted to convince Armenians to surrender their guns. [4]
A 1903 law banned the manufacture or import of gunpowder without government permission. [5] In 1910, manufacturing or importing weapons without
government permission, as well as carrying weapons or ammunition without permission was
forbidden. [6]

During World War I, in February 1915,
local officials in each Armenian district were ordered to surrender quotas of firearms.
When officials surrendered the required number, they were executed for conspiracy against
the government. When officials could not surrender enough weapons from their community,
the officials were executed for stockpiling weapons. Armenian homes were also searched,
and firearms confiscated. Many of these mountain dwellers had kept arms despite prior
government efforts to disarm them. [7]

The genocide against Armenians began with the April 24, 1915 announcement that Armenians would be deported to the interior. The announcement came
while the Ottoman government was desperately afraid of an Allied attack that would turn
Turkey's war against Russia into a two-front war. In fact, British troops landed at
Gallipoli in western Turkey the
next day. Although the Anglo-Russian offensives failed miserably, the Armenian genocide
continued for the next two years. [8] Some of the genocide
was accomplished by shooting or cutting down Armenian men. The bulk of the 1 to 1.5
million Armenian deaths, however, occurred during the forced marches to the interior.
Although the marches were ostensibly for the purpose of protecting the Armenians through
relocation, the actual purpose was to make the marches so difficult (for example, by not
providing any food) that survival was impossible. [9]

The Armenian genocide differs from the six other genocides
detailed in Lethal Laws in one important respect. Although many Armenians
apparently complied with the gun control laws and the deportation orders, some did not.
For example, in southern Syria (then part of the Ottoman Empire), "the Armenians
refused to submit to the deportation order . . . . Retreating into the hills, they took up
a strategic position and organized an impregnable defense. The Turks attacked and were
repulsed with huge losses. They proceeded to lay siege." [10]
Eventually 4,000 survivors of the siege were rescued by the British and French. [11] These Armenians who grabbed their guns and headed for
the hills are the converse to the vast numbers of Armenian and other genocide victims in Lethal
Laws who submitted quietly; although many of the Armenian fighters doubtless died
from lack of medical care, starvation, or gunfire, so did many of the Armenians who
submitted. As was the case of the Jewish resistance during World War II, armed resistance
was enormously risky, but the resisters had a far higher survival rate than the
submitters.

B. Soviet Union

As the authors note, the Bolsheviks were a minority of Communists in a vast and disparate nation where Communists themselves
were a tiny minority. It should not be surprising that the Bolsheviks worked hard to
ensure that any person potentially hostile to them did not possess arms. [12]

The first Soviet gun controls were imposed during the Russian Civil War, as
Czarists, Western troops, and national independence movements battled the central Red
regime. Firearm registration was introduced on April 1, 1918. [13]
On August 30, Fanny Kaplan supposedly
wounded Lenin during an assassination attempt;
the attempted assassination spurred a nationwide reign of terror. [14] In October 1918, the Council of People's Commissars (the government)
ordered the surrender of all firearms, ammunition, and sabres. [15] As has been the case in almost every nation where firearms
registration has been introduced, registration proved a prelude to confiscation. Exempt
from the confiscation order, however, were members of the Communist Party. [16] A 1920 decree imposed a mandatory minimum penalty of six months in
prison for (non-Communist) possession of a firearm, even where there was no criminal
intent. [17]

After the Red victory in the Civil War, the firearms laws
were consolidated in a Criminal Code, which provided that unauthorized possession of a
firearm would be punishable by hard labor. [18] A 1925
law made unauthorized possession of a firearm punishable by three months of hard labor,
plus a fine of 300 rubles (equal to about four months' wages for a highly-paid
construction worker). [19]

Stalin
apparently found little need to change the weapons control structure he had inherited. His
only contributions were a 1935 law making illegal carrying of a knife punishable by five
years in prison and a decree of that same year extending "all penalties, including
death, down to twelve-year-old children." [20]

This chapter of Lethal Laws summarizes the
genocide perpetrated by Stalin from 1929 to 1953, starting with his efforts to collectivize
farming by destroying the class of property-owning farmers. Altogether, about twenty
million people were murdered, worked to death in slave labor camps, or deliberately
starved to death by Stalin's government. From 1929 to 1939, Stalin killed about ten
million people, more than all the people who died during the entirety of World War I.
Stalin's successful campaign of genocide against the Kulaks and against dissident
Communists served as a model for similar campaigns in China and Cambodia. [21]

C. Germany

German gun control laws are the authors' area of expertise. Mr. Simkin and Mr. Zelman have previously written a book
analyzing the Weimar and Nazi gun laws in great detail. [22]
The German chapter in Lethal Laws contains the most relevant statutes and
regulations, but does not include gun registration forms and similar materials found in
the previous book. Because Lethal Laws does contain more analysis of the German
gun laws in their social context, Lethal Laws is the more valuable book to anyone
except a specialist in German law.

After Germany's defeat in World War I, the democratic Weimar government, fearing
(with good cause) efforts by Communists or the militaristic right to overthrow the
government, ordered the surrender of all firearms. Governmental efforts to disarm the
civilian population--in part to comply with the Versailles
Treaty--apparently ended in 1921. [23]

The major German gun control law (which was not replaced
by the Nazis until 1938) was enacted by a center-right government in 1928. [24] The law required a permit to acquire a gun or ammunition and a
permit to carry a firearm. Firearm and ammunition dealers were required to obtain permits
to sell and to keep a register of their sales. Also, persons who owned guns that did not
have a serial number were ordered to have the dealer or manufacturer stamp a serial number
on them. Permits to acquire guns and ammunition were to be granted only to persons of
"undoubted reliability," [25] and carry permits
were to be given "only if a demonstration of need is set forth." [26] Apparently police discretion cut very heavily against permit
applicants. For example, in the town of Northeim, only nine hunting permits were issued to
a population of 10,000 people. [27]

In 1931, amidst rising gang violence (the gangs being Nazi
and Communist youths), carrying knives or truncheons in public was made illegal, except
for persons who had firearm carry permits under the 1928 law. Acquisition of firearms and
ammunition permits was made subject to proof of "need." [28]

When the Nazis took power in 1933, they apparently found that the 1928 gun control laws served their purposes; not until 1938 did the Nazis bother
to replace the 1928 law. The leaving of the Weimar law in place cannot be attributed to
lethargy on the Nazis' part; unlike some other totalitarian governments (such as the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia), the Nazis paid great attention to legal draftsmanship and issued a
huge volume of laws and regulations. [29] The only
immediate change the Nazis made to the gun laws was to bar the import of handguns. [30]

Shortly after the Nazis took power, they began house-to-house searches to discover firearms in the homes of suspected opponents. They
claimed to find large numbers of weapons in the hands of subversives. [31] How many weapons the Nazis actually recovered may never be known.
But as historian William Sheridan Allen pointed out in his study of the Nazi rise to power
in one town: "Whether or not all the weapon discoveries reported in the local press
were authentic is unimportant. The newspapers reported whatever they were told by the
police, and what people believed was what was more important than what was true." [32]

Four days after Hitler's triumphant Anschluss of Austria in March 1938, the Nazis finally enacted their own firearms laws. Additional
controls were layered on the 1928 Weimar law: Persons under eighteen were forbidden to buy
firearms or ammunition; a special permit was introduced for handguns; Jews were barred
from businesses involving firearms; Nazi officials were exempted from the firearms permit
system; silencers were outlawed; twenty-two caliber cartridges with hollow points were
banned; and firearms which could fold or break down "beyond the common limits of
hunting and sporting activities" became illegal. [33]

On November 9, 1938 and into the next morning, the Nazis
unleashed a nationwide race riot. Mobs inspired by the government attacked Jews in their
homes, looted Jewish businesses, and burned synagogues, with no interference from the
police. [34] The riot became known as "Kristallnacht"
("night of broken glass"). [35] On November 11,
Hitler issued a decree forbidding Jews to possess firearms, knives, or truncheons under
any circumstances, and to surrender them immediately. [36]

Nazi mass murders of Jews began after the invasion of the
Soviet Union. Extermination camps were not set up until late 1941, so mass murder was at
first accomplished by special S.S. units, Einsatzgruppen, on
June 22, 1941. Working closely with regular army units, the Einsatzgruppen would
move swiftly into newly-conquered areas, to prevent Jews from fleeing. In some cases, Jews
were ordered to register with the authorities, an act which made them easy to locate for
murder shortly thereafter. As noted above, most of the Soviet population had been disarmed
by Lenin and Stalin or had never possessed arms in the first place. [37] Raul Hilberg, a leading scholar of the Nazi military, summarizes that

The killers were well armed, they knew what to do, and
they worked swiftly. The victims were unarmed, bewildered, and followed orders. . . . It
is significant that the Jews allowed themselves to be shot without resistance. In all
reports of the Einsatzgruppen there were few references to "incidents." The
killing units never lost a man during a shooting operation. . . . [T]he Jews remained
paralyzed after their first brush with death and in spite of advance knowledge of their
fate. [38]

How could Jews with "advance knowledge of their fate" allow themselves to be murdered? The authors suggest that

These Jews' passivity doubtless was the result of centuries of victimization in Russia. They had come to believe that being victimized was
normal. In most cases in Jewish experience, the victimizers were satisfied after the first
few victims. In such situations, resisting was likely to prolong the victimization, and
thus to increase the number of victims. Most Jews did not realize that the Nazis were
different. Most Jews did not realize the Nazis had no use for living Jews.

On top of this tendency to accept being victimized, twenty
years of Communist rule--of which Stalin's terror had occupied ten years--had shown Jews
that failure to obey orders was a fatal mistake. [39]

Although many Jews remained passive
throughout the Holocaust, some did not. In 1943, the Nazis attempted to commence the
liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. [40] But as the Nazis
moved in, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization opened fire. "[T]he shock of
encountering resistance evidently forced the Germans to discontinue their work in order to
make more thorough preparations." [41] The revolt
continued, leading Goebbels to note in his diary: "This just shows what you can
expect from Jews if they lay hands on weapons." [42]
Although the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto were eventually defeated, the Warsaw battle was
perhaps the most significant ever for the Jews, according to Raul Hilberg: "In Jewish
history, the battle is literally a revolution, for after two thousand years of a policy of
submission the wheel had been turned and once again Jews were using force." [43]

There were other Jewish uprisings; even in the
death camps of Sobibor
and Treblinka,
Jews seized arms from the Nazi guards and attempted to escape. A few succeeded, and more
significantly, the camps were closed prematurely. [44]
The authors do not attempt to tell the complete story of Jewish guerilla resistance during
World War II. [45]

The German chapter is the most successful in the book. The
perpetrators and the victims of Nazism both left extensive written records, allowing
Simkin, Zelman, and Rice to integrate their always-strong textual analysis of the gun laws
with a discussion of the actual impact of the laws on the lives of victims. [46]

The China chapter is much less enlightening, mostly because the victims of Mao's genocide, unlike Hitler's,
left much less of a record for Western historians to uncover. While many scholars agree
that about one million people were murdered during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the
number of people who were starved to death by Mao's communization of the economy from 1957
to 1960 ("the Great Leap Forward") might be as low as one million, or as high as
thirty million. [47]

Mao, like Hitler, inherited gun control from his predecessor's regime. [48] A 1912 Chinese law made it
illegal to import or possess rifles, cannons, or explosives without a permit. [49] The law was apparently aimed at the warlords who were
contesting the central government's authority; Chinese peasants were far too poor to
afford guns. [50] Communist gun control was not enacted
until 1957, when the National People's Congress outlawed the manufacture, repair,
purchase, or possession of any firearm or ammunition "in contravention of safety
provisions." [51]

E. Guatemala

Perhaps the most overlooked genocide of the twentieth century has been the Guatemalan government's campaign against its Indian
population. One reason that the genocide has attracted little attention may be that the
Guatemalan government has been friendly to the United States.

Gun control in Guatemala has always been intimately tied
to the military's determination to maintain itself as the dominant institution in society.
[52] After taking power with a revolutionary army of just
forty-five men, the Guatemalan government of 1871 speedily decreed the registration of all
"new model" firearms. [53] Registered guns were
subject to impoundment whenever the government thought necessary. [54] In 1873, firearms sales were prohibited, and firearms owners were
required to turn their guns over to the government. [55]

Apparently, the enforcement of the 1873 law began to wane. In 1923, General Jose Orellana, who had taken power in a coup a few years before, put into
force a comprehensive gun control decree. [56] The law
barred most firearms imports, outlawed the carrying of guns in towns (except by government
officials), required a license for carrying guns "on the public roads and
railways," set the fee for a carry license high enough so as to be beyond the reach
of poor people, and prohibited ownership of any gun that could fire a military caliber
cartridge. [57]

In 1944, two officers led a revolt against the military
government. [58] "Distributing arms to students and
civilian supporters, they soon gained control of the city [Guatemala City, the capital],
and two days later Ponce [the dictator] resigned, though not before nearly a hundred
people had died in the sporadic fighting." [59] The
first free elections in half a century were held. [60]
The new government did not eliminate the gun control laws, but it did regularize the
issuance of carry permits by specifying that the permits would be issued to an applicant
who could "prove his good character by means of testimonials from two persons of
known honesty." [61]

In 1952, the democratically-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz began an agrarian reform plan that expropriated large uncultivated estates. [62] Compensation was based on the taxable value of the
land. The United Fruit Company was angry at the seizure of 386,000 acres of the company's
reserve land in exchange for what the company considered inadequate compensation. [63] In June 1954, a force of Guatemalan exiles, trained by
the CIA, invaded Guatemala from Honduras. [64]
"Unable accurately to assess the situation in the capital, Arbenz resolved to do as
he had done in 1944 and distribute weapons to the workers for the defense of the
government. The army refused to obey, and on 27 June, Arbenz resigned . . . ." [65]

Contrary to the assertion of the authors, [66] it is unclear whether total repeal of the gun controls a decade
before would have saved the democratic government. Firearms at a free-market price might
still have been beyond the financial reach of the peasants and students in a very poor
country. What might have made a difference, however, is the actual distribution of surplus
military arms for free to the citizens of Guatemala while the democratic regime was in
power. [67] But such a policy was not implemented, and
for all practical purposes, the military retained a monopoly of force. As the authors
note, the monopoly "made Arbenz, a duly elected President, serve at the Military's
pleasure. When they wanted him to go, he went." [68]

In November 1960, reformist military officers attempted a coup and garnered the support of about half the army. [69]
Peasants, wanting to fight for their own land, asked the rebels for guns so that the
peasants could join the battle; the rebels refused. [70]
The coup was finally crushed by loyalist forces who were supported by the United States. [71] From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Guatemalan government
found itself engaged in perpetual counterinsurgency campaigns. As part of these campaigns,
right-wing terror squads were unleashed to murder suspected subversives, although regular
army units also participated extensively. [72]
Approximately 100,000 Mayan Indians were murdered by the government during this period. [73]

Amnesty International
has waged a long and courageous campaign against human rights abuses in Guatemala. [74] The authors reviewing Amnesty International's proposals
for restoring human rights to Guatemala, note that the group nowhere advocates recognition
of a strong legal right to arms or the arming of the victim populations. [75] Instead, Amnesty argues that the government should control itself
better:

The government should also thoroughly review the present
method of reporting and certifying violent deaths, particularly those resulting from
actions taken by any person in an official capacity. The aim of such an inquiry should be
to create procedures which will ensure that such deaths are reported to the authorities,
who then impartially investigate the circumstances and causes of the deaths. All efforts
should be made to identify the unidentified bodies that are found in the country and
frequently buried only as "xx", in order to determine time, place and manner of
death and whether a criminal act has been committed. [76]

Is the Amnesty proposal realistic? "It seems absurd," write Simkin, Zelman, and Rice, "to appeal to so
blood-drenched a government to 'impartially investigate' atrocities its officials have
committed." [77]

The failure of the Guatemalan government to prosecute its agents for perpetrating government-sponsored genocide suggests that hopes for domestic
legal reform may be of little use in actually stopping genocide. As the next two chapters
illustrate, international law may be of little greater practical efficacy.

If international organizations such as the United Nations were ever going to intervene to stop a genocide in progress, Uganda
in the 1970s would have been the ideal spot. Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was a world pariah
with no powerful allies. He was generally regarded as insane (perhaps from advanced
venereal disease) and his army was, by world power standards, pitiful. [78] From 1990 to 1991, the United States assembled and led a worldwide
coalition which easily drove Iraqi conquerors out of Kuwait. [79]
A multinational coalition conquest of Uganda would have been all the easier, since Idi
Amin's army was tiny compared to Saddam Hussein's war machine. [80] Kuwait, however, was a strategic oil resource, [81] while Uganda had few resources other than the Ugandan people who
were being slaughtered by their government. Although the existence of the Ugandan genocide
was well-established as it was being perpetrated, the possibility of a multinational
campaign to oust Idi Amin was never even a topic for serious discussion, whereas
discussion about the reconquest of Kuwait began days after Iraqi tanks entered Kuwait. [82]

Not once in this century has one nation or a coalition of
nations launched a military action to stop a genocide in progress. It is true that wars
have sometimes led to a genocidal regime being deposed; Tanzania ousted Amin, and the
Allies defeated Hitler. But Tanzania and the Allies acted only because their territory had
been invaded, not because they were moved to action by reports of the murders within
Uganda or within Nazi Germany.

Notably, even when the Allies were engaged in all-out war against Hitler, they refused to take military action against the extermination camps, such
as by bombing the rail lines that led to them. [83] As
historian Raul Hilberg writes, "The Allied nations who were at war with Germany did
not come to the aid of Germany's victims. The Jews of Europe had no allies. In its gravest
hour Jewry stood alone, and the realization of that desertion came as a shock to Jewish
leaders all over the world." [84] The people of
Uganda likewise stood alone from 1971 to 1979, when Idi Amin's dictatorship killed about
300,000 people, roughly 2.3% of the total population. [85]

The authors began their study of Ugandan gun laws with a
1955 statute promulgated by the British imperial government, although this gun control law
may not have been Uganda's first. [86] Although the
British/Ugandan law had the length and complexity typical of modern statutes, the essence
was a provision requiring that a person could only possess a firearm if he had a permit,
and the permit would be granted by the police only upon a discretionary finding regarding
the applicant's "fitness" to possess a firearm. [87]

Uganda achieved independence in 1962, [88] keeping the structure of the Colonial gun laws intact. In 1966,
Milton Obote assumed dictatorial powers. In 1969, Obote tightened the gun laws, imposing a
nationwide ban on firearms and ammunition possession, making exceptions only for
government officials and for persons granted an exemption by the government. [89] In 1970, the 1955 British gun law was recodified, with
some minor changes. [90]

Idi Amin took power in 1971, and the mass murders began shortly thereafter. The nation's
large Asian population was expelled (not murdered), and in the process the Ugandan
government seized approximately a billion dollars' worth of the Asians' property. [91] The main targets of the Ugandan government's mass
murders were members of tribes whom Amin perceived as a threat to his power. [92] Because Uganda had far less of an infrastructure than
Nazi Germany, the murders were perpetrated mostly by bands of soldiers who shot their
victims, rather than through extermination camps. [93]

Amin's army numbered about 25,000 and his secret
police--the "State Research Bureau"--only 3,000. [94]
The army was ill-disciplined and incompetent, and collapsed not long after Amin began his
ill-advised war against Tanzania in late 1978. [95] How
could such a small and pathetic army get away with mass murder against a nation of
thirteen million people? Is it possible that a disarmed Ugandan population was easier to
murder than an armed one?

Idi Amin, by the way, now lives in Saudi Arabia. [96] As far as I know, there has been no effort to extradite
him and put him on trial for murder. With the exceptions of the rulers of the nations that
lost World War II, none of the perpetrators of genocide in the 20th century have been
prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

G. Cambodia

Also enjoying a comfortable post-genocide life is Pol
Pot, the perpetrator of the best known mass-murders of the post-World War II era.

Cambodian gun control was a legacy of French colonialism. [97] A series of Royal Ordinances, decreed by a monarchy
subservient to the French, appears to have been enacted out of fear of the Communist and
anti-colonial insurgencies that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s throughout
Southeast Asia, although not in Cambodia. [98] The first
law, in 1920, dealt with the carrying of guns, while the last law in the series, in 1938,
imposed a strict licensing system. [99] Only hunters
could have guns, and they were allowed to own only a single firearm. [100] These colonial laws appear to have stayed in place after Cambodia
was granted independence. The Khmer
Rouge enacted no new gun control laws, for they enacted no laws at all other than a
Constitution. [101]

Cambodia was a poor country, and few people could afford guns. [102] On the other hand, the chaos that
accompanies any war might have given some Cambodians the opportunity to acquire firearms
from corrupt or dead soldiers. There is no solid evidence about how many Cambodians, with
no cultural history of firearms ownership, attempted to do so. [103]

As soon as the Khmer Rouge took power, they immediately
set out to disarm the populace. One Cambodian recalls that

Eang [a woman] watched soldiers stride onto the porches of
the houses and knock on the doors and ask the people who answered if they had any weapons.
"We are here now to protect you," the soldiers said, "and no one has a need
for a weapon any more." People who said that they kept no weapons were forced to
stand aside and allow the soldiers to look for themselves. . . . The round-up of weapons
took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers had concluded the villagers were no longer
armed, they dropped their pretense of friendliness. . . . The soldiers said everyone would
have to leave the village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when
the search was finished, they could return. [104]

People being forced out of villages and cities were searched thoroughly, and weapons and foreign currency were confiscated. [105] To the limited extent that Cambodians owned guns
through the government licensing system, the names of registered gun owners were of course
available to the new government. [106]

The Cambodian genocide was unique in the twentieth
century, in that its target was not a single ethnic, religious, or political group, but
rather the entire educated populace. Lacking infrastructure for sophisticated Nazi-style
extermination camps, the Khmer Rouge used the genocide methods which had been used by the
Turkish government (internal deportations with forced marches designed to kill), the
Soviet government (hard labor under conditions likely to kill), and the Guatemalan
government (murders of targeted victims). [107]

Like other victims of genocide, the Cambodians forced into
slave labor were kept so desperately hungry that revolt became difficult to contemplate,
as every thought focused on food. One slave laborer explained that

There was no possibility of an uprising. . . . Contact
between many people was made impossible by the chlops [informers] . . . . Besides, we had
no arms and no food. Even if we'd been able to produce arms and kill the fifty Khmer Rouge
in the village, what would happen to us? We didn't have enough food to build up any
reserves to sustain a guerilla army. In our state of weakness, after a few days wandering
in the jungle, death would have been inevitable. [108]

The authors estimate that Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge murdered about a million people, at least 14% of the Cambodian
population. [109] The percentage was about the same as
the percentage of the Soviet population murdered by Stalin, except that Pol Pot
accomplished in three-and-a-half years what took Stalin twenty. [110]

The mass murders of the Khmer Rouge became well-known in
the international community, but no nation made an effort to try to rescue the Cambodian
people. Finally, Pol Pot was driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion that was motivated
by imperialist, rather than humanitarian reasons. [111]

Pol Pot's fate was thus similar to Idi Amin's: the world
would tolerate genocide, but threatening the borders of a neighboring country would lead
to the regime's demise. According to the New York Times, "Pol Pot is today a
free, prosperous and apparently unrepentant man who, 15 years after his ouster from Phnom
Penh, continues to plot a return to power. The calls for some sort of international
genocide tribunal for Pol Pot and his aides have not been heard for years." [112]

The authors have demonstrated that every nation in the
twentieth century which has perpetrated genocide has chosen a victim population which was
disarmed. If the intended victims were not already "gun-free," then the
murderous governments first got rid of the guns before they attempted to begin the
killing.

II. Is Resistance Practical?

The most common argument against an armed population as an antidote to genocide is that, in the late twentieth century, the
balance of power between governments and the people has tipped decisively towards the
government side. How can a rag-tag collection of citizens with rifles, pistols, and
shotguns hope to resist a modern standing army with artillery, helicopters, tanks, jets,
and nuclear weapons? Such a question is most frequently posed by persons who have neither
personal nor intellectual familiarity with the military or with guerilla warfare. If we
actually try to answer the question, rather than just presuming the government will win,
then the case for the uselessness of citizen resistance becomes weak indeed.

First, the purpose of civilian small arms in any kind of
resistance scenario is not to defeat the federal army in a pitched battle, and then
triumphantly march into Washington, D.C. Citizen militias and other popular forces, such
as guerilla cadres, have rarely been strong enough to defeat a professional army in a
head-on battle. Guerilla warfare aims to conduct quick surprise raids on the enemy, at a
time and place of the guerillas' choosing. Almost as soon as the first casualties have
been inflicted, the guerillas flee, before the army can bring its superior firepower to bear.

In the early years of a guerilla war, as Mao Tse-Tung explained, before guerrillas are strong enough to attack a professional army head on,
heavy weapons are a detriment, impeding the guerrillas' mobility. As a war progresses, the
guerrillas use ordinary firearms to capture better small arms and eventually heavy
equipment. [113]

The military history of the twentieth century shows rather
clearly that if guerillas are willing to wage a prolonged war, they can be quite
successful. As one author notes that

Far from proving invincible, in the vast majority of cases in this century in which they have confronted popular insurgencies, modern armies have
been unable to suppress the insurgents. This is why the British no longer rule in Israel
and Ireland, the French in Indo-China, Algeria, and Madagascar, the Portuguese in Angola,
the whites in Rhodesia, or General Somoza, General Battista, or the Shah in Nicaragua,
Cuba, and Iran respectively--not to mention the examples of the United States in Vietnam
and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. [114]

Moreover, guerillas need not overthrow a government in order to accomplish their purposes. During World War II,
Yugoslav partisans did not directly overthrow the occupying Nazi government, but they did
tie down a large fraction of the entire German army, leaving the German armies in the
Eastern, Western, and Mediterranean fronts that much weaker. As the war ended, the
presence of a well-equipped popular fighting force, ready to assume power, helped convince
the advancing Soviet armies not to move into Yugoslavia, and consequently set the
foundation for a Yugoslavia that would, relative to the rest of Eastern Europe, be less
subject to a Soviet sphere of influence.

A popular guerilla resistance can also deprive an occupying government of much or all of the economic benefit that would normally be gained
by occupation. And perhaps most importantly for purposes of this Article, an armed
populace can ensure that any efforts to kill people or to send them to prisons and
concentrations camps carry a price that must be paid by the government. If the Jews of
Nazi-occupied Europe had shot the Nazi soldiers who came to herd them onto cattle cars,
the Jews would still have been killed, but so would some of the Nazis. Would the Nazis
have had such an easy time sending soldiers into the ghettos to collect the Jews if the
soldiers knew that some of them would not come back alive? If the kind of people who
specialize in perpetrating genocide are bullies by nature, how many bullies are willing to
take a chance of getting shot by the intended victim? If potential massacre victims can
plausibly threaten to harm at least a few of their attackers, then the calculus of the
attackers may change dramatically. As Sanford Levinson notes, it is not implausible to
argue that

"[I]f all the Chinese citizens kept arms, their
rulers would hardly have dared to massacre the [Tiananmen Square] demonstrators. . .
." It is simply silly to respond that small arms are irrelevant against nuclear-armed
states . . . . A state facing a totally disarmed population is in a far better position,
for good or for ill, to suppress popular demonstrations and uprisings than one that must
calculate the possibilities of its soldiers and officials being injured or killed. [115]

Finally, even in cases where resistance saves not a single victim's life, resistance is still better than submission.
Lloyd R. Cohen observes that

Dying even futilely defending yourself, your family, and your group has an honor and a dignity to it that is not vouchsafed by being helplessly
slaughtered. Thus even if none had escaped from the Warsaw or Vilna Ghettos or the Sobibor
extermination camp, those who took vengeance there honored themselves, their families, and
their people. [116]

Although the American federal government is the best-armed and wealthiest in the world, so is the American populace.
Approximately half of all American households possess a gun. [117] In the United States, there is more than one gun for every adult
American. [118] Hundreds of thousands (or millions) of
Americans practice "reloading"--the home manufacture of ammunition--as a hobby. [119] As of the fall of 1994, commercial American
ammunition makers were producing well over a million rounds of ammunition per day
and yet cannot keep up with the immense consumer demand. [120]
In response to the gun control laws being enacted and proposed in 1993 and 1994, the
American gun-owning public has begun stockpiling weapons and ammunition in quantities that
may be without historical precedent. [121] Now that Guns
and Ammo, a magazine with a circulation of half a million, has begun publishing tips
about how to bury guns for long-term storage, it is safe to assume that a rather large
number of gun owners are putting away a great deal of provisions for a rainy day. [122]

Everything else that a guerilla army could want is also
abundant in America: binoculars, camouflage (owned by millions of hunters), ham radios and
other sophisticated communications equipment, and abundant quantities of well-preserved
food.

There is something else in abundance in America that guerillas love: a place to hide. The great swamps of the South, the thick forests of the
Rocky Mountains and the Northwest, and the dense, crowded cities throughout the nation are
only a few of the American locales that would be eminently suitable to providing havens
for guerilla fighters.

The American military is also powerful. But, as the authors point out, the police and military combined (assuming that every soldier and every
police officer would assist a genocidal government) comprise only about one percent of the
U.S. population. [123] Many of the modern army's most
effective weapons--such as tanks, artillery, and helicopters--are easy to deploy in a
Kuwaiti desert, but considerably less effective in a built-up city. Indeed, a million
dollar tank can be incapacitated by a Molotov Cocktail (a glass bottle filled with
gasoline and topped with a wick that is lit just before the cocktail is thrown). [124] As a last resort, a dictatorial government could
initiate nuclear warfare, but such a step would risk provoking the non-militant fraction
of the population into full-scale rebellion, risk provoking a faction of the army into
attempting a coup, and by destroying the bombed area, certainly deprive the government of
any benefit of controlling the area.

Finally, the most important benefit of defensive arms is
their deterrent power. As long as a potential dictator (or a potentially genocidal
dictator) must take into account very serious risks involved with taking action against
the American people, then the prospect for such actions being taken becomes markedly smaller.

No one can forecast exactly what would happen if the American people took up arms against a dictatorial government. But there is no evidence
from the history of warfare, or from any other source, to support a simplistic assertion
that resistance could not possibly achieve any success.

III. When to Resist

A much more plausible objection to the authors' thesis is that, even though an armed populace can resist genocide,
the population may not know when to resist. Had European Jews shot the soldiers
who were herding them into cattle cars for transportation to concentration camps, the
survival rate for European Jews might have been much higher. But there were other
instances, some of them well-known to European Jewry, where non-resistance proved to be
the correct approach.

The classic example involves the Babylonian captivity of Biblical times. As the Babylonian Empire of King Nebuchadnezzar was sweeping westward, the
tiny kingdom of Judea fell within its path. As the final Judean stronghold, Jerusalem, was
besieged, the Jews faced a choice of surrendering, with the likelihood of being taken into
slavery and exile, or fighting to the last man. The prophet Jeremiah insisted on the former course, and
that is the course Judea's king eventually chose.

As things turned out, that was the right choice
historically for the Jews. The Babylonian captivity turned out not to be terribly arduous;
many Jews grew quite prosperous in Babylon. Captivity in Babylon also took the Jews away
from Canaanite influence, meaning that the continuing struggle to resist syncretism
between Canaanite
nature religion and strict Yahwism was ended. The Judaism that emerged from the
Babylonian captivity was a purer, stronger form of Judaism than the one that had been
under continuous Canaanite assimilative pressure, although some Babylonian myths and
legends were incorporated. Within a few generations, Babylon was conquered by the Persian
Empire of King Cyrus, and Cyrus
allowed many of the Jews to return to Jerusalem and begin rebuilding the Temple.
Eventually, re-establishment of an independent Judean state was allowed. Acceptance of
transportation and captivity turned out to be a much better long-term choice than a battle
to the last man.

During World War II, the Japanese-Americans who were
herded into concentration camps fared better by accepting several years of confinement
than they would have by taking to the California hills and launching a guerilla war.

How is one to know that the impending forced march or
transportation by cattle car is intended not merely for an onerous relocation, but for
mass murder? Generally, one cannot. As the authors point out in their chapter on Germany,
the Jewish policy of submission had been, for over 1800 years, the policy which saved the
most Jewish lives. [125] Not until the Jews realized
that Hitler intended to murder them all did Jewish resistance groups begin taking action.

Of the seven genocidal governments studied in Lethal
Laws, not one announced its intention to its victims. All of the victims were told
that they were being temporarily relocated or another lie in order to induce them not to
resist. And one of the reasons that the lies were believed by so many people is that there
are many governments throughout world history which have sent people on forced marches or
other forms of forced relocation and not killed them. [126]

One guide for when a subject people should resist may be the people's assessment of the government's degree of hatred. King Nebuchadnezzar was no
anti-Semite and bore the Jews no more ill will than he bore the people of any nation he
conquered. Hitler was obviously different: hatred of Jews was one of the fundamental
principles of his life, as he had demonstrated throughout his public career.

Forewarned is forearmed, but the problem of knowing when to take up arms poses a significant challenge to the authors' thesis that gun ownership
can always prevent genocide. Even if all of the genocide victims discussed in Lethal
Laws had possessed their own semiautomatic rifle, it is far from certain that they
all would have decided at the right time to shoot enemy soldiers. Still, some of the
genocide victims might have done so, and the more that did so, the less genocide there
might have been. It appears that, despite the hopes of the authors, civilian gun ownership
may sometimes, but not always, prove capable of stopping genocide.

IV. It Can't Happen Here

It did happen here. The conquest of North America by the European settlers of the future United States was
accomplished by "the extermination of some Native American tribes and the
near-extinction of others, by U.S. government forces . . . ." [127] The forced march of the Cherokee people from the southeastern
United States into Oklahoma along the "Trail of
Tears" resulted in the deaths of a large fraction of the Cherokee population, and
at best, differs quantitatively rather than qualitatively from the 20th-century genocides
described in Lethal Laws. Hitler looked with admiration at how the United States
government had cleared the continent of Indians, and he used the U.S. government's
19th-century policies as a model for his own 20th-century policies of clearing Lebensraum
for the German people.

In the twentieth century, the United States government
forced 100,000 United States citizens into concentration camps. [128] In 1941, American citizens of Japanese descent were herded into concentration camps
run by the United States government. [129] Like the
victims of other mass deportations, these Americans were allowed to retain only the
property they could carry with them. Everything else--including family businesses built up
over generations--had to be sold immediately at fire-sale prices or abandoned. [130] The camps were "ringed with barbed wire fences
and guard towers." [131] During the war, the
federal government pushed Central and South American governments to round up persons of
Japanese ancestry in those nations and have them shipped to the U.S. concentration camps. [132]

The American concentration camps were not death camps. The American-held prisoners were subject to strict discipline, but not to mass murder. [133] After the American victory at Midway
in June 1942, the threat of a Japanese landing on the mainland U.S. vanished, and the tide
in the Pacific began to turn. [134] Nevertheless, the
incarceration of Japanese-Americans continued long after any plausible national security
justification had vanished.

But, the authors ask, what if the war had gone differently? What if a frustrated, angry America, continuing to lose a war in the Pacific,
had been tempted to take revenge on the "enemy" that was, in the concentration
camps, a safe target. [135] Would killing all the
Japanese be a potential policy option? In 1944, by which time America's eventual victory
in the war seemed assured, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, "What do you think we
should do with Japan, as a country, after the war?" Thirteen percent of Americans
chose the response "Kill all Japanese people." [136]

Sadly, Roger Daniels, the author of a recent study of the Japanese internment, concludes that a concentration camp episode could indeed happen again
in America. [137] He points out that in 1950, a time by
which the oppressiveness and uselessness of the American concentration camps during World
War II had been well-established, Congress enacted the Emergency Detention Act, which gave
the Attorney General unilateral authority to imprison Americans at will, using the World
War II concentration camps as a model. [138]
Fortunately, the law was repealed in 1971, but as Daniels points out, the original
detentions occurred even though they were not authorized by any law. [139]

Disarming citizens before killing or oppressing them is a
time-honored American tradition. After the Civil War, the first act of the Ku Klux Klan (like
the Khmer Rouge) was to round up all the guns in the hands of ex-slaves. Only then did
other oppressions begin. [140] From the middle of the
nineteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth, race riots in the United States
usually took the form of white mobs rampaging against innocent blacks. Black attempts to
resist or to shoot back were often followed with governmental efforts to disarm the
blacks. [141]

Are modern Americans so dramatically different from their
ancestors that concentration camps or mob violence are safely confined to the past? While
Mayor of New York City, Edward Koch (who is Jewish) proposed that the federal government
set up concentration camps for drug users, in remote locations such as Nevada and Alaska. [142] Under Mayor Koch's successor David Dinkins, after a
Jewish religious leader's driver killed a black child, rampaging black mobs conducted a
three-day pogrom against a Jewish section of Brooklyn and killed an Australian Jew who was
visiting the United States, while the police passively refused to intervene. [143]

Hatemongers such as Louis Farrakhan are now treated as important leaders by an increasingly large segment of the American black community,
including the NAACP, which for decades before had been steadfastly opposed to racial
hatred and anti-Semitism. In an age of Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, is America immune
from the influence of bigots, crackpots, hatemongers, or potential dictators? A Klansman
and former Nazi named David Duke was elected to the State House of Representatives in
Louisiana in 1989. He then won 44% of the vote against the incumbent U.S. Senator in 1990.
[144] The next year, he won 39% of the vote in a race
for Governor, garnering over 60% of the vote from the white middle-class and from white
Protestants. [145]

What other countries can be presumed forever safe from hatemongering rule? In August 1994, the Labor Minister of the Italian government--a
government which a half-century earlier was a Fascist ally of Hitler--blamed the fall of
the lira on the "Jewish lobby" in the United States. [146] Virtually none of the world's democratic nations can boast an
uninterrupted history of democracy, nor can they claim that racist or anti-Semitic
elements are of no significance in the nation's current political life.

Imagine that the year is 1900. You are told that within
fifty years, a nation in the world will kill over six million members of a religious
minority. Which nation would you pick? If you were well-informed about world affairs, it
is very unlikely that you would pick Germany. In 1900, Germany was a democratic,
progressive nation. Jews living there enjoyed fuller acceptance in society than they did
in Britain, France, or the United States. In 1900, probably much less than 13% of the
German population favored killing all Jews. Thirty-five years later, circumstances had
changed.

The prospect of a dictatorial American government thirty-five years from now seems almost impossible. What about a hundred years from today?
Two hundred? It is possible to say, with near-certainty, that "it can't happen
here--in the near future." But in the long run, no one can say; the fact that it did
happen here in the nineteenth century, coupled with the fact that American concentration
camps were opened in the twentieth century, ought to suggest that only someone
willfully
blind to American and world history would attempt to guarantee to future generations of
potential American victims that "it can't happen here."

V. The Roots of the Right to Arms

Lethal Laws' thesis that the ultimate purpose of gun ownership is for citizens to shoot government troops (or
simply to possess arms, thereby deterring governmental violence) will offend many persons,
including many gun owners, who like to consider gun ownership in the pleasant, bucolic
context of hunting. [147] But the authors' viewpoint is
precisely the viewpoint of the intellectual world from which the Second Amendment sprang.

The framers of the American Constitution were strongly of
the opinion that "it could happen here." They drafted the Constitution as a
counterpoint to the abuses of government which they had endured themselves and which they
knew about from history. Not the least of these abuses were the French government's mass
persecutions of the disarmed Huguenots in the previous century. Indeed, a sizeable number
of Huguenots fled to the United States. [148]

After the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and religious
persecutions in 17th-century Great Britain, William Blackstone in the eighteenth century
described the right to arms as the fifth and last "auxiliary right" of the
subject, meant to protect all other rights. The right "of having arms for their
defence" was "a public allowance under restrictions, of the natural right of
resistance and self preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found
insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression." [149]
Sir Walter Raleigh was simply repeating the conventional wisdom of his age when he noted
that a tyrant will seek "to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby
they resist his power." [150]

The drafters of the American Constitution trusted the
people more than the government, intended the armed populace to be the ultimate check in
the system of checks and balances, and meant to reserve to the American people the right
affirmed in the Declaration
of Independence to "alter or abolish" a tyrannical government. James Madison's friend Tench Coxe explained that

[T]he powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry
of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and
accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and
irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves. . . . Congress
have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of
the soldier, are the birthright of an American. . . . [T]he unlimited power of
the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but,
where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. [151]

Tench Coxe's words from across the centuries are not very different from those of the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey:
"The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary
government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America,
but which historically has proved to be always possible." [152] Consistent with these quotations, virtually every scholar in the
last 15 years who has studied the history of the Second Amendment finds that it was
intended to recognize, not create, a fundamental human right to possess weapons, a right
whose primary purpose was to facilitate resistance to a tyrannical government. [153]

Although the Bible was less influential in the political theory of the early American republic than the histories of Great Britain, Greece, and
Rome were, all of the people who shaped the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (including
Deists such as Jefferson
and Franklin) knew the Bible well and took its history lessons seriously. The Book of
Esther is set in the period of the Babylonian captivity and stands as a counterpoint to
Jeremiah, which is set in the period leading up to the conquest of Judea by Babylon.
Babylonian King Ahasuerus, influenced by a malicious advisor, orders the extermination of
all Jews. The King's wife, Queen Esther, is secretly a Jew and risks her life by telling
the King and convincing him to execute the malicious advisor. Unfortunately, the King's
order to execute and plunder the Jews has already gone out and cannot legally be
rescinded. But the King can send out a second decree, so he sends a decree telling

the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves
together, and to stand for their life, to destroy and slay, and to cause to perish, all
the power of the people and provinces that would assault them . . . . Thus the Jews smote
all their enemies with the stroke of the sword . . . . [T]he other Jews that were in the
king's provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest
from their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand . . . . [154]

Although the authors focus primarily on the physical implications of gun controls--of genocide victims being deprived of tools
which would facilitate resistance--the classical ideologists of the right to bear arms
would have agreed with them. However, they might have added another point which they
thought even more important: disarmament upsets the proper relationship between the master
(the people) and the servant (the government) by making the people accustomed to
dependence on the government. Machiavelli observed that

[A]mong other ills which ensue from being disarmed is
contempt . . . . There can be no proper relation between one who is armed and one who is
not; nor is it reasonable to expect that one who is armed will voluntarily obey one who is
not, or that the latter will feel secure among servants who are armed. [155]

Joel Barlow observed that

[it] palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind: an habitual
disuse of physical force totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of
protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression. [156]

To the generation that drafted the Second Amendment, possessing arms to deter a government (or a mob which might be inspired
by the government) that might contemplate mass murder was an uncontroversial moral
imperative. The fact that the same message in the 20th-century book Lethal Laws
may be considered so radical as to be not even worth discussing is perhaps one reason why
genocide has become the great pandemic of the twentieth century.

VI. Conclusion: Taking Genocide Seriously

One of the contributions of Lethal
Laws is that it moves the gun control debate beyond the point where it has been stuck
for a very long time on what might be called the "lone homeowner." Gun rights
advocates have claimed that armed citizens can use guns to defend themselves against
criminals, while gun prohibition advocates have countered that ordinary people cannot use
firearms effectively under stress, and that the defensive home gun is more likely to be
used to kill a loved one during an argument than to provide any meaningful protection.
What results from the lone homeowner debate is an attempted calculus of net lives
saved--or lost--due to gun control, as one attempts to weigh the self-defense value of
firearms, the ability of gun control laws to disarm criminals, to factor in whatever extra
quantum of suicide is attributable to the presence of guns in the home, to guess how many
gun accident victims are so reckless that they would likely die in some other accident,
and so forth. [157] Notably, many gun control advocates
acknowledge that proposed controls will have little effect, but they support new
restrictions with the theory "if it saves one life, it's worth it."

This gun control calculus will no doubt continue to
interest many criminologists, but Lethal Laws offers some powerful evidence that
the calculus is of little relevance to the ultimate question of the human cost of gun
control. Let us assume that the entire difference in the homicide rate between
the United States and Europe is due to the absence of sufficiently stringent American gun
laws comparable to the European laws. [158] Thus, if
Europe moved to an American-style system of less-restrictive gun controls, the European
homicide rate would immediately rise to American levels. If we make these assumptions,
then we find, as the authors note, that "with an American-style murder rate it would
take 400 years for Europe's common criminals to murder as many people as the Nazi
government murdered in just 13 years." [159]

In other words, over the long run, the risk to life from criminal governments is overwhelmingly larger than the risk to life from lone criminals.
Gun control measures which substantially reduce the possibility of resistance to genocide,
but which offer little commensurate increase in lives saved, might thus be considered to
endanger rather than enhance public safety. For example, so-called "assault
rifles" are virtually never used in crime in the United States (they are used in less
than one percent of homicides), but they are the best weapons for civilian resistance to a
genocidal government. [160] The authors force us to
consider whether the recently-enacted Congressional prohibition on so-called "assault
weapons" may actually be a lethal law. Conversely, laws which do not disarm the
populace and which do not create government-owned lists of gunowners--such as laws
punishing reckless conduct with a gun which causes the injury of a child--would seem
unobjectionable under the Lethal laws thesis.

Even persons who reject the book's thesis will find it
helpful in understanding why many gun owners resist seemingly "reasonable"
controls. America's leading gun prohibition lobby, Handgun Control, Inc., hypothesizes
that those who objected to the "Brady Bill" simply had a selfish objection to
the "inconvenience" of waiting a week to buy a handgun. [161] The more fundamental objection, however, was that to let the
government take control over the populace's acquisition of firearms was to put in place
precisely the kind of laws which a murderous government could use to disarm its victims.
Whether the fears are considered credible or not, they are real, and serious advocates of
gun control need to address them.

Another valuable feature of Lethal Laws is that it traces the connection between gun prohibition and prohibition of alcohol and drugs.
This story should one day merit its own book, but in the meantime, the authors remind us
how parasitic gun control has been on drug and alcohol control. America's first major gun
control law, the National Firearms Act of 1934, was a direct result of the violence
engendered by alcohol prohibition. [162] The authors
might have noted also that current "gun control" efforts are partly a response
to the violence that has resulted from the "drug war," and partly a reflection
of the drug war's message that the government should prevent adults from possessing
objects, such as semiautomatic rifles or marijuana, whose possession offends the
sensibilities of the majority of the population.

But by far the most important accomplishment of Lethal Laws is that it forces us to think seriously about genocide--forcing us to do more
than simply deplore mass murder by the government, and to start thinking about how to end
such murders.

The rhetoric of the "public health" campaign against gun ownership labels gun violence a "disease" and guns a "disease
vector." [163] But if malicious human acts are to
be classified as a disease, then as Lethal Laws observes, "[g]enocide is
among humankind's deadliest 'diseases.'" [164]

It is important to note the crisis situation that the world has come to regarding genocide. Since World War II, more people have been killed in
state-sponsored genocide than have been killed by war. [165]
Genocide is more common in the twentieth century than in any century. As this Article was
written, genocide was in progress in Rwanda[166] and Bosnia, and the world
community had done nothing effective to stop the genocide in either nation. (Although
discovered by the authors too late for inclusion in Lethal Laws, the gun control
laws in both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were similar to gun control laws which have
facilitated genocide in other nations.)

In fact, the authors may significantly underestimate
the 20th-century death count from genocide. Their eight-nation study uses conservative
estimates of genocide in each of the nations to arrive at a total death count of 56
million. [167] University of Hawaii political science
professor R.J. Rummel has researched the demographic evidence regarding genocides in much
more detail, and he puts the total number of victims of mass murders by governments during
the twentieth century at 169,198,000. If the deaths of military combatants are included,
the death total rises to 203,000,000. Rummel's book, Statistics of Democide:
Estimates, Sources, and Calculations on 20th Century Genocide and Mass Murder,
includes data on mass murders by several regimes not discussed in Lethal Laws.
These regimes (number of deaths in parentheses) include: Nationalist China (10,076,000
from 1928 to 1949); Japan (5,964,000); Vietnam (1,678,000); North Korea (1,663,000);
Poland (1,585,000 from 1945 to 1948); Pakistan (1,503,000); Mexico (1,417,000 from 1900 to
1920); Yugoslavia (1,072,000 from 1944 to 1987); and Czarist Russia (1,066,000 from 1900
to 1917). [168] There is no evidence that any of these
nations deviated from the pattern described in Lethal Laws: the preference to
murder unarmed victims who were subject to gun controls. [169]

Stated another way, the number of people killed by
governments in the twentieth century is over two-thirds of the current population of the
United States. As a cause of premature death, criminal governments massively outpace
ordinary criminals, as well as most types of disease.

Are we serious about ending the genocide epidemic? If so, then we must seriously consider what kind of genocide control measures have any prospect
of success. International organizations such as the United Nations are plainly
insufficient. The United Nations has failed to stop the current genocides in Rwanda and
Bosnia. Nor did the United Nations or any other international body take action even
against Idi Amin in Uganda, since Uganda had no serious strategic protectors, unlike the
Guatemalan generals, who were U.S. allies, or the Khmer Rouge, who were Chinese allies.
The Ugandan army was powerful only in comparison to the disarmed Ugandan people; Amin's
army could have been rapidly toppled by any international force. Amin's mass murder and
repression were well-known as they were occurring. And yet, the world did nothing. There
is no historical evidence to believe that any collection of nations will ever take action
against a genocidal nation for humanitarian reasons. Hitler, Idi Amin, and the Khmer Rouge
provoked international action only when they attacked other nations. As long as the
genocide was an internal affair, nothing was done. The majority of governments represented
at the United Nations are dictatorships which rule by armed force rather than by consent. [170] A body dominated by such dictatorships is unlikely
to become a powerful force for human rights.

If international action to interrupt genocide is not a
realistic solution, is post-hoc punishment of genocide perpetrators any better? The Nazi
war crimes trials were an appropriate way to mete out justice. [171] But other than the losers of World War II, none of the
20th-century genocide perpetrators has been brought to justice. To the contrary, most of
them died in their beds, wealthy and powerful. Pol Pot and Idi Amin even today live
comfortable lives, and Pol Pot continues to plan a return to power. The deterrent effect
of the possibility of prosecution for crimes against humanity appears to be rather small,
or at least not large enough to have prevented Stalin and Mao from perpetrating genocide
not long after the war crimes trials were completed, or to have prevented later genocide
in Cambodia, Uganda, Guatemala, East
Timor, Kurdistan, Rwanda, and Bosnia. [172] Also
living comfortable lives after a career of mass murder are Haile Mengitsu, who
deliberately starved rebellious Ethiopian provinces, and Mohammad Najibullah, who ruled as
the Soviet puppet in Afghanistan while one million Afghanis were killed. [173] If the world cannot muster the will to bring small-time tyrants
such as Idi Amin and Pol Pot to justice, it is hard to believe that grander criminals,
running more powerful nations, will have much fear of an international genocide tribunal.

Persons who support post-hoc punishment of genocide organizers are advocates of a worthwhile cause, but it will be a long time before genocide
perpetrators are prosecuted with a regularity and certainty that deters future
perpetrators. To the contrary, the history of the 20th century suggests that most people
who perpetrate genocide get away with it. And notably, government officials who order
genocide policies do not usually expect to be deposed, so they are unlikely to be deterred
by the possibility of prosecution.

Reducing hatred is a worthwhile anti-genocide strategy. Educational programs may play an important long-term role in reducing the kinds of hatred
that pave the way for genocide. Promoting respect for peoples of all races and religions
should be a key objective of every educational system in the world. [174] But as the authors point out, hatred has been part of the human
condition as long as there have been humans. Unless we believe that human nature can be
fundamentally reformed, then hatred is going to persist in some form, and as long as there
is hatred, there will be inclinations for genocide.

The authors give us a formula for three key preconditions of genocide: hatred, government, and gun control. Without any of these three elements,
genocide is not possible. Obviously, not all countries which have all three elements also
have genocide, but every country which has genocide has all three elements. The authors
assume too readily that the second key precondition for genocide--government--is
inevitable. To the contrary, as Bruce L. Benson argues persuasively in his book, The
Enterprise of Law, it is possible to have law, peace, and civility without having
government. [175] And it is not impossible that coming
decades may see a major trend towards "panarchy"--that is, governments which
have power over only small communities and which enjoy the true consent of the governed,
since the governed are free to move anywhere else, or to choose a new government. The
break-up of the Soviet Union may perhaps be a beginning of a trend in this direction. But
while a world without government may make for interesting speculation among futurologists,
such a world is not our current one, nor is it likely to be for several decades, if ever.

Reducing the power of government, however, is a far more
plausible goal. The authors note the increasing surveillance powers that the United States
government has achieved in recent years, often as a result of the "drug war." In
Nazi-occupied Europe, some Jewish children were sheltered by Gentile families, who
successfully claimed the children as their own. Greater governmental ability to verify and
track the identity of persons from cradle to grave obviously makes it much harder for
genocide targets to slip through the cracks. Thus, when greater government identity
controls are proposed for the purposes of tax compliance, control of illegal immigration,
health care, drug law enforcement, or gun law enforcement, we should consider rather
seriously whether we really want the government to always be able to know someone's
identity. [176]

The problem of restricting government power is that people
are most likely to actually be able to reduce the powers of governments which abide by
popular control and the rule of law. These governments are the very governments least
likely to perpetrate genocide. Should the law-abiding government with reduced powers be
one day replaced by a different government, attempting to control the new government is
likely to be much more difficult.

A democratic system of government and a free press can
also help prevent genocide. But these protections are not always sufficient. Hitler came
to power legally, after winning a democratic election. And even democratic governments can
be overthrown by violent coups or by war. That is how most genocidal governments in this
century have come to power. In short, there are a number of viable anti-genocide
strategies, all of which may do some good, and all of which should be tried. But none of
them, or all of them together, may be sufficient.

And so we are left with the prescription of Lethal
Laws and its focus on the third element of the genocide triad: the unarmed victim. If
all potential genocide victims (i.e. everyone) have a gun (ideally a semi-automatic
rifle), then genocide becomes much more difficult. As Lethal Laws demonstrates,
governments will not attempt genocide until they have first disarmed the victims. Victims
cannot be disarmed against their will. If potential victims are willing to draw a line in
the sand, then they can, at the least, inflict casualties on government forces before the
surviving soldiers or policemen "take my gun from my cold dead fingers." [177] Genocide is pre-eminently the work of bullies, and
if bullies take a large risk of being shot, then many bullies are apt to desist. Moreover,
the very presence of an armed populace is likely to deter any attempt at genocide in the
first place; at least that is the theory which animated the founders of the American
republic, and it is a theory which Lethal Laws suggests will have continued
viability in the twentieth century.

No one can tell whether Jeremiah or Esther will provide
the best guidance for a future situation. But it is undeniable that the twentieth century
has been a century of pandemic genocide. Governments have never been more murderous than
in this century. Something needs to change if the twenty-first century is not going to be
as lethal as the twentieth. The Nazi and Soviet regimes which perpetrated two of the
leading Mass Murders of the century are gone now, but anti-Semitic fascism is currently a
powerful political force in Russia. And the current Chinese government is the successor to
the one that killed so many people during the cultural revolution. Most of the Third World
continues to be ruled by the same kinds of tyrants who have perpetrated the Third World
genocides of the last several decades. We need to recognize that the authors have advanced
an anti-genocide theory which looks considerably stronger and more realistic than any
competing anti-genocide scheme.

While Lethal Laws focuses on gun ownership as a
deterrent to genocide, the authors also have an opinion about the relationship between a
disarmed populace and other human rights abuses: "Amnesty International--an
organization devoted to ending abuses of human rights and the freeing of political
prisoners--could prevent much of the evil it denounces, if it promoted unrestricted
civilian ownership of military-type firearms." [178]
Not all countries with severe gun controls perpetrate torture or genocide; but how many
governments which perpetrate torture permit any but the most politically reliable segments
of the population to own guns? If every government which engages in systematic torture has
disarmed its victim population, is there reason to believe that those governments see a
relationship between gun control and the maintenance of the government's power?

Although Lethal Laws is premised on a political
philosophy that would have seemed quite ordinary to the drafters of the Bill of Rights, in
today's political climate Lethal Laws is a genuinely radical book. But simply
because something is radical does not mean that the legal community (and the rest of the
world) should ignore it--otherwise, Catherine
MacKinnon would not be teaching at the University of Michigan Law School, and Duncan
Kennedy would not have tenure at Harvard.

Indeed, Lethal Laws reminds me in many ways of
the books by MacKinnon's friend Andrea
Dworkin. Simkin, Zelman, Rice, and Dworkin all write with an engaging, passionate
style. They do not adopt an air of academic detachment; the intensity of their belief in
their cause bursts through every word. You will find no more of an attempt to weigh the
benefits of gun control in Lethal Laws than you will find a list of the ways that
patriarchy genuinely benefits women in a Dworkin book. Lethal Laws, in contrast
to the Dworkin books, is meticulously footnoted and based almost entirely on non-radical
source material. Dworkin, Simkin, Zelman, and Rice all suffer from a tendency to overstate
their case and to vilify their opponents. These flaws have not kept Dworkin's basic point
from being acknowledged by the legal academy, nor should the same flaws keep Simkin,
Zelman, and Rice locked outside the academy.

Dworkin advances a thesis (all heterosexual intercourse is
rape) that is radical and novel. Simkin, Zelman, and Rice bring us a thesis that was once
a platitude, but which is now challenging and radical (gun control facilitates murder by
the government). In the legal academy, Dworkin is accorded a respectful hearing, even by
people who ultimately reject her conclusions. Simkin, Zelman, and Rice are equally
entitled to respectful consideration of their radical thesis. If they do not receive such
consideration, it will be evidence that in today's legal community, radical feminism is
politically correct, but the Second Amendment (and the free-thought principles of the
First Amendment) is not.

Genocide is a human rights violation that dwarves all
other crimes. If we are to be serious--and not merely sanctimonious--about human rights,
then we must be serious about eradicating genocide. Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman, and Alan M.
Rice have shown that a well-armed population which is prepared to resist is much less
likely to be murdered by its government than is a disarmed population. If the people of
the world were much better armed, many fewer people would be the victims of genocide.
Unless one can propose a different method of ending endemic genocide, then the authors'
prescriptions stand as the best, and only, potentially effective medicine. The burden has
shifted to the opponents of firearms rights to either come up with a more effective
anti-genocide medicine or to admit that saving lives was never the primary objective of
the gun prohibition movement in the first place.

The decree also specified that
minors could not be given arms unless the license specified the name of an adult who would
be responsible. As in New York City (for handguns) and New Jersey (for all guns) under
current laws, unlicensed persons were not permitted even for a moment to touch a firearm,
even for supervised use at a range. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the
Issuing, Keeping, and Handling of Firearms, reprinted in 9 Decrees
of Soviet Power 104 (Moscow, 1978), reprinted in Simkin
et al., supra note 2, at 129. ("It is absolutely forbidden to hand
over weapons to anyone, whether for temporary use, or for storage.")

[20]Id. The "crime bill" enacted by the United States Congress in August
1994 provides for the death penalty for offenders as young as thirteen-years-old. Violent
Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 199th Pub. L. No. 103-332, 108 Stat. 1796.

[34]
As the then-head of the German police, Hermann Göring, stated, "I refuse the notion
that the police are protective troops for Jewish stores. The police protect whoever comes
into Germany legitimately, but not Jewish usurers." Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out 188 (Don
B. Kates, Jr. ed., 1979).

In Michigan, handgun permit laws
were enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black, shot and killed a person in a mob that was
attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit
police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd. Don B. Kates, Jr., History
of Handgun Prohibition in the United States, in Restricting
Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, supra note 34, at 19. Indicted
for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as
his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore
Herald vigorously defended blacks' right to use deadly force in self-defense against
a mob. Walter White, The Sweet Trial, Crisis, Jan.
1926, at 125; Irving Stone, Clarence
Darrow for the Defense 529-47 (1941); Herbert Shapiro, White Violence
and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery 188-96 (1988).

Darrow summed up for the jury:
"[T]hey may have been gunmen. They may have tried to murder. But they were not
cowards . . . . [E]leven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in
the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight
for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every other
human being that lives." Clarence Darrow, Attorney for the Damned 241-42 (Arthur
Weinberg ed., 1957).

The Jews had built bunkers with
underground tunnels, and grew increasingly well-armed with rifles, machineguns, handguns,
grenades, and other explosives supplied by the Polish resistance, smuggled out of Nazi
factories, or taken from dead Nazi soldiers. A major Nazi assault began on April 19, with
the expectation that the ghetto would be cleared in time for Hitler's birthday on the
20th. The assault was led by a tank and two armored cars; a Jewish unit set the tank on
fire twice, forcing a Nazi retreat. See Simkin et al.,
supra note 2; Caplan, supra note 40.

The Nazis returned with artillery,
and after April 22, Nazi artillery drove many Jews into the Jewish tunnel system that
connected with the sewers. The Nazis used poison gasses to attempt to clear the Jews out
of the sewers. Nazi forces could not directly take on the buildings where the Jews had
built hidden bunkers, cellars, and attics; room-to-room fighting would have inflicted
unacceptably high casualties on the Nazis. So the Nazis began to burn down the Warsaw
ghetto, one building at a time. Explosives and artillery were used to smash the buildings
that were not flammable. On April 25, the Nazi commanding general recorded in his diary
"this evening one can see a gigantic sea of flames." Even so, the Jewish will to
resist was not broken. Finally, on May 15, the Warsaw synagogue was blown up, and the
battle was over. In contrast to the usual result when the Nazis made an area into a
"Jew-free-zone", there was nothing of economic value for the Nazis to take; to
the contrary, the Nazis had been forced to pay a price in order to take Jewish lives. Id.

[46]
Another strength of the chapter is that the authors merely mention in passing, but do not
elaborate on, their theory from their previous book that the Nazi gun law served as a
model for America's Gun Control Act of 1968. Simkin et al, supra note 2, at 2.
The theory is actually not quite as absurd as it might seem at first glance. The 1968
American law was primarily the work of Connecticut Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who served as a
senior prosecutor on the American legal staff at the Nuremburg trials. Dodd was apparently
familiar with the Nazi gun laws. See Lewis C. Coffin, Law Librarian, Library of Congress,
to Senator Thomas J. Dodd, July 12, 1968 (sending Dodd a translation of the 1938 Nazi gun
law, and noting that Dodd has supplied the Library of Congress with his own German text of
the law). It is also true that Senator Dodd, as a Nuremburg prosecutor, had no reason in
any of his professional work to need a copy of the German gun control law. Id. at
79-80. But the fact that Dodd was interested in the Nazi law is hardly proof, by itself,
that the Nazi law was the basis for the American law.

Ultimately, any claim of linkage
between the two laws must depend on common elements in those laws. What similarities do
Simkin and Zelman see between the 1938 German law and the 1968 American law? Both laws:
exempted the government from the controls that applied to law-abiding citizens; treated
firearms ownership as a privilege granted by the government rather than as a right; and
required that gun buyers meet some test of reliability. The 1968 American law requires the
gun purchaser to affirm under felony penalty that he is not a convicted felon,
dishonorably discharged from the military, an alcoholic, a drug user, or otherwise
disqualified under federal law.) Simkin & Zelman, supra
note 22, at 83. All these features are indeed common to the 1938 Nazi and 1968 American
laws. But these features are common to virtually any gun control anywhere in the world.
The premise of the vast majority of gun laws around the globe, before and after 1938, is
that the government can be trusted with weapons, but certain classes of citizens should
not, and accordingly gun acquisition or ownership should be regulated by the government so
as to disarm those untrustworthy classes. These three common features, rather than proving
that the American law derives from the Nazi law, simply prove that American and Nazi law
both followed the standard world-wide pattern of gun control.

A fourth feature common to the Nazi
and American laws is more intriguing. The Nazi law allowed guns with particular features
to be banned based on governmental determination that they were not "sporting."
The American law allowed the government to prohibit the import of guns which the
government did not find to be "particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to
sporting purposes." Gun Control Act of 1968, Pub. L. 90-618, 82 Stat. 1213 (codified
as amended at 18 U.S.C. § 925(d)(3)).

The distinction between supposedly
benign "sporting" weapons (supposedly used for killing animals) and other
weapons (which might be used for killing government troops) is not, however, original to
Nazi law. The 1921 Firearms Act in Great Britain, for example, set up a licensing system
for handguns and rifles, but left shotguns unregulated. Although the Act did not use the
word "sporting," the reason that shotguns were treated differently from rifles
and handguns is that shotguns were seen as benign sports instruments for bird-hunting,
whereas rifles and handguns were (in the wake of World War I) considered military weapons
whose main purpose was anti-personnel. David B. Kopel, The Samurai,
The Mountie, and The Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies?
78-79 (1992).

[54]Id. at 237. The law actually listed particular firearms manufacturers ("as
for example, a rifle or carbine made by Henry, Winchester, Sneider [sic], Remington,
etc.). Id. The 1971 Guatemalan law was one of the very few brand-specific gun
control laws ever enacted, until American local governments began enacting "assault
weapon" bans in the late 1980's that defined "assault weapon" not by
characteristic, but by brand name and model. David B. Kopel, Hold Your Fire, Pol'y Rev., Jan. 1993, at 58.

[67]
By way of historical precedent, some American colonies bought guns for militiamen who
could not afford their own. Don B. Kates, Jr., Handgun Prohibition and the Original
Meaning of the Second Amendment, 82 Mich. L. Rev. 204,
215 n.46 (1983).

[76]
Amnesty International, Guatemala: The Human Rights Record
150-51 (1987), reprinted in Simkin et al., supra
note 2, at 234. By way of disclosure, I should note that I have been a monthly donor to
Amnesty International since 1984.

[104]
Alec Wilkinson, A Changed Vision of God, New Yorker,
Jan. 24, 1994, at 54-55, quoted in Simkin et al., supra
note 2, at 306. Similarly, one refugee recalled the days after the Cuban revolution
overthrew Batista: "We believed [Castro] when he said we should surrender our arms
because we did not need guns now that we were a free country . . . [and] we rushed to the
police station to give up our guns." Lin Williams, The Rise of Castro: 'If only
we hadn't given up our guns!', Medina County Gazette,
Oct. 15, 1976, at 5.

[110]Id. As with the other nations studied, the authors use a conservative estimate
for the total number of deaths. Other scholars of genocide put the number of killings in
Cambodia much higher. R.J. Rummel, Death by
Government 175 (1994).

[126]
For example, some of the forced population exchanges between Greece and Turkey and the
Jewish Diaspora after the failed revolt against the Roman Empire.

[127]Id. at 21. Even if the conflict between the European settlers and the Indians is
viewed as war between sovereign nations, the war (on both sides) included numerous attacks
on non-combatants and many successful attempts to starve civilian populations into
submission.

[147]
Hunting is obviously not very pleasant for the prey. But unless one is prepared to go as
far as to argue that humans should intervene to prevent animals from hurting each other,
it is difficult to argue that a deer which is killed by a clean shot from a high-powered
hunting rifle is not better off than a deer which dies after being torn apart by a
wolf-pack, or dies a slow, painful death from starvation in the winter.

[152]Quoted in David Hardy, The Second Amendment As a Restraint on State and
Federal Firearms Restrictions, in Restricting
Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out 184-85 (Don B. Kates, Jr., ed., 1979).

[153]
Kates, supra note 148, at 90. Armed resistance to criminal government was seen
simply as a larger case of resistance to a lone criminal, a right which was so generally
accepted as to not even be questioned. Id.

Compare two articles which agree
that the Second Amendment does not prevent gun prohibition today but which acknowledge
that the Second Amendment was intended to confer an individual right. David C. Williams, Civic Republicanism and the
Citizen Militia: The Terrifying Second Amendment, 101 Yale
L.J. 551 (1991), reasons that since state governments have neglected their duties
to promote responsible gun use through drill in a "well-regulated militia," the
right to arms is no longer valid. Donald L. Beschle, Reconsidering the Second
Amendment: Constitutional Protection for a Right of Security, 9 Hamline L. Rev. 69 (1986) concludes that the Amendment guarantees
an individual right of personal security, but the right can be protected by outlawing
firearms. Articles concluding that the Second Amendment confers only a right on states,
and not on persons, are Samuel Fields, Guns, Crime and the Negligent Gun Owner,
10 N. Ky. L. Rev. 141 (1982); Warren Spannaus, State
Firearms Regulation and the Second Amendment, 6 Hamline L. Rev.
383 (1983); Lawrence Cress, An Armed Community: The Origins and Meaning of the Right
to Bear Arms, 71 J. Am. His. 22 (1983); Keith A. Ehrman
& Dennis A. Henigan, The Second Amendment in the Twentieth Century: Have You Seen
Your Militia Lately? 15 Dayton L. Rev. 5 (1989); Dennis
A. Henigan, Arms, Anarchy and the Second Amendment, 26 Val.
U. L. Rev. 107 (1991).

One interesting piece of new
scholarship argues that an individual right to own handguns for personal protection can be
found in the federal Ninth Amendment. Nicholas J. Johnson, Beyond the Second
Amendment: An Individual Right to Arms Viewed through the Ninth Amendment, 24 Rutgers L.J. 1 (1992).

[154]Esther8:11, 9:5, 9:16 (King James). The
King James version was used in eighteenth-century America. Religious scholars now concur
that the Book of Esther is probably ahistorical, a fact that does not invalidate its
theological significance. 1 Isaac Asimov, Asimov's Guide to the
Bible 462 (1968).

Barlow's viewpoint is shared by
Raymond Kessler, a Marxist political scientist who argues that a disarmed populace is more
likely to feel dependent on the government and therefore is unwilling to question
fundamental social issues. See Raymond Kessler, Gun Control and Political
Power, 5 Law & Pol'y Q. 383 (1983).

[157]
The best quantitative analysis of all of these issues can be found in Kleck, supra note 117. The book was awarded the Hindelang
Prize by the American Society of Criminology for making the most significant contribution
to criminology in a three-year period.

[158]
Closer analysis suggests that very little, if any, of the difference between the American
homicide rate and the homicide rate in other democratic nations is due to gun control
laws. See Kopel, supra note 46.

[160]
The statistics on "assault weapons" and their utility in insurrection are
detailed at length in Simkin et al., supra note 2,
at 39-48. See also David B. Kopel, Rational Basis Analysis of "Assault
Weapon" Prohibition, 20 J. Contemp. Law 381
(1994). [Same data available in David B. Kopel, Assault Weapons, in Guns: Who
Should Have Them (David B. Kopel, ed., 1997).]

[161]
David B. Kopel, Guns--In Whose Hands? (forthcoming manuscript on file with the author).
[Published as David B. Kopel, Background Checks and Waiting Periods, in Guns: Who
Should Have Them (David B. Kopel, ed., 1997).]

Even much of the rhetoric is the
same. Today's "gun-free zones" are the direct progeny of "drug-free
zones."

The Anti-Saloon League at the beginning of the
twentieth century complained that there were more saloons in the United States than there
were schools, libraries, hospitals, theaters, parks, or churches. Id. at 25. This
complaint pre-figures the complaint of the handgun prohibitionist Violence Policy Center
that late-20th-century America has "More Gun Dealers than Gas Stations."

The "More X than Y"
complaints, while accompanied by high moral dudgeon, often reflect a failure to think
through simple economics. A saloon can profitably operate with a few dozen customers a
day, only a few of which may be in a saloon at a given moment. In contrast, few hospitals
can pay their expenses by having only a half-dozen beds occupied at a given moment. Unlike
saloons (which need only chairs, tables, a bar, and a supply of alcohol), hospitals
generally require large investments in capital assets--again making the existence of a few
large hospitals much more viable than numerous small hospitals. So it should not be
surprising that there are fewer hospitals than saloons and that most hospitals are much
larger than most saloons.

Similarly, until the Clinton
administration's recent "crack-down," it was possible for a person to operate a
firearms business as a second business from the home, selling a few dozen guns a year to
friends by working an evening or two a week. In contrast, gasoline dealers cannot operate
profitably without staying open most daylight hours and attracting a huge traffic of
mostly anonymous customers. Selling firearms from one's home requires almost no capital
investment, whereas operating a gas station requires a significant capital investment in
the station itself, as well as in the (increasingly-expensive) storage tanks and fuel
pumps that must comply with environmental regulations. Again, it should not be surprising
that more small businesspeople can become part-time dealers of firearms than can become
full-time operators of capital intensive gas stations. The fact that America has more gun
dealers than gas stations (and more saloons than hospitals) should surprise only a person
who is ignorant of economics, and who expects that the quantity of any given item in
society should be in proportion to his appraisal of its moral worth.

[168]
R.J. Rummel, Statistics of Democide: Estimates, Sources and
Calculations on 20th Century Genocide and Mass Murder (1994) (this book is a
statistical companion to R.J. Rummel, Death by Government, supra
note 110.)

[169]See Simkin et al., supra note 2, at
187-228. As with the countries described in Lethal Laws, the gun controls were
generally not instituted by the genocidal regimes; rather, the laws were in place before
the murderous government took office.

Unless Yugoslavia, North Korea, and
Vietnam had different gun control policies from those of every other Communist government
whose gun laws have been studied in the West, these nations would have had strict gun
controls. Mexico currently has quite strict gun laws. Robert L.
Nay, Law Library of Congress, Firearms Regulations in Various Foreign Countries
124-34 (1990). But further research is needed to determine the state of Mexican gun
ownership by civilians in the early twentieth century. Further research is likewise
required regarding gun laws in Pakistan and Czarist Russia. The victims of the Japanese
mass murders were not Japanese, but citizens of other Asian nations, and the details of
gun laws in those nations in the 1930s and 1940s are generally sketchy (except in China).

[170]
These nations are almost all contemporary confirmation of James Madison's observation that
a tyranny in which the government is controlled by a dictatorship, "could not be safe
with a numerical and physical force against it, without a standing Army, an enslaved
press, and a disarmed populace." James Madison Autobiography, 2 Wm. & Mary Q. 191, 208 (1945).

[176]
As a starting point, I would favor immediate repeal of the requirement that children be
issued social security numbers in order to be claimed as tax deductions. Internal Revenue Service, Publication 501: Exemptions, Standard
Deduction, and Filing Information 17 (1994).

[177]
"You can have my gun when you take it from my cold, dead fingers" is a common
bumper sticker or t-shirt motto for some gun owners, including the Sheriff of Graham
County, Arizona, who used it as the title of his book defending the right to keep and bear
arms. Richard Mack, From My Cold,
Dead Fingers (1994). Sheriff Mack was the plaintiff in one of the several
lawsuits in which the Brady Act's unfunded mandate that local law enforcement perform a
background check on handgun buyers was declared a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Mack
v. United States, No. CIV 94-113 TCUC JMR (D. Ariz., June 29, 1994).

[178]
Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 71. Interestingly,
one of the former Presidents of Amnesty International USA, a New York attorney named Mark
Benenson, now heads the National Foundation for Firearms Education, a group devoted to
protecting Second Amendment rights.

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